WHY ALAN J. KUPERMAN IS WRONG ON TRUMP BEING RIGHT ON UKRAINE

PART 2

This two-part post provides a rebuttal to Alan J. Kuperman’s March 18, 2025, op-ed in The Hill, entitled “Sadly, Trump Is Right on Ukraine”.

First, we’re committed to accuracy and apologize for misstating Professor Kupperman’s university affiliation. He is an associate professor of public affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin, not the University of Austin.”

Casus belli 

In another page taken from the Russian playbook, Professor Kuperman directly charges President Volodymyr Zelensky with having “contributed to a wider war by violating peace deals with Russia and seeking NATO military aid and membership”. This refers to the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 peace processes, and we’ll return to them in a moment. 

However, it is striking that Kuperman does not once reference the Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994. This is quite an omission. As a matter of law, the accord is why we’re having this discussion. It is why Ukraine is not the world’s third largest nuclear power today. It is why Ukrainians are cowering in shelters at 3 AM as Iranian, North Korean and Russian munitions rain down on them. Because they don’t have a nuclear deterrent. 

As Kuperman is a published expert in nuclear proliferation, the omission is bizarre. For those in the American establishment who cannot think back 30 years, this memorandum obliges the US, UK and the Russian Federation to actively protect the territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine’s borders and to refrain from the use or threat of military force. 

We guaranteed Ukraine would never need to worry again if it simply gave up its nuclear weapons. It did – then we reneged. With this deception, the West, through its failures to adequately defend Ukraine, and Russia, through its naked aggression, sent a clear message to every country in the world that does not yet have nuclear weapons: Get nukes as fast as you can. 

Cue Poland’s wish to have nuclear weapons on its soil and warnings of an arms race driven by NATO inaction over Russian aggression in the east. For Kuperman and, it appears, Trump World, blaming Ukraine is our get-out-of-jail-free card. But countries like Iran aren’t tricked and would be irrational not to double down on their nuclear program.

Returning to the narrative, blaming Zelensky specifically for violating the Minsk agreements is central to the Russian narrative – and Kuperman’s (and Trump’s). It claims that Zelensky is the inheritor of an illegitimate junta who then embarks on further provoking Russia, specifically by oppressing the nascent democracies of the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics.

First, what were the Minsk agreements? It describes the eight-year negotiating process that ended with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. To borrow from the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR) summary, the Minsk agreements “established a formal Russian commitment to return the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk to Ukrainian control (which thus implied respect for Ukraine’s territorial integrity): the Minsk agreements were at least in theory supposed to bring about the full reintegration of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions into Ukraine. Secondly, following their signing, violence and casualties fell significantly, even if the ceasefire was never complete and sustained.”

As the ECFR and many others pointed out, Russia and Ukraine had divergent priorities that hobbled the process before and after Zelensky was elected president. For Russia, the priority was requiring Ukraine to change its constitution to allow far greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk. It relied on the fiction that the two regions were run by locals desiring self-governance instead of FSB-trained proxies. Meanwhile, Moscow carried on a “creeping annexation,” flooding the region with 200,000 Russian passports and, of course, arms. Then, it recognized the regions as “independent” in February 2022. Within days, Russia launched its full-scale invasion, which even Kuperman would agree was a violation of the Minsk process. 

Counterfactual

Again, for Kuperman, Zelensky – president from 2019 – was the central figure to blame for the failure of the Minsk process. He writes: “Zelensky instead [of implementing the accords] increased weapons imports from NATO countries, which was the last straw for Putin.”

Putting aside the logic of condemning Zelensky for importing weapons when his neighbor is in the fifth war of waging a dirty war on his country’s soil, Kuperman raises an interesting counterfactual. What if Zelensky had done what Kuperman and the Russians demanded and used, in 2019, his Servant of the People’s majority in parliament and pushed through massive constitutional reforms that granted the country’s regions sweeping powers over local policing and education, for example?

Following these measures, he would have then presumably pushed for internationally observed elections in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk (including the regions, not just the cities under Russian occupation), permitting Ukrainian loyalists to run for office and allowing journalists to look at the books. 

Kuperman would likely also demand the withdrawal of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, even from towns that to this day don’t back pro-Russian forces. Would Ukraine be allowed to ask for peacekeepers from NATO or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe? Would Kuperman allow that in his counterfactual?

Against this background, would Zelensky, according to Kuperman,  have been within his rights to demand and enforce the expulsion of FSB and GRU agents from the territories? Would Kuperman and the Russians have allowed for people like Igor Girkin to be arrested and tried in a Ukrainian court for war crimes? Where is the line for this mode of thinking? This essay suggests Kuperman isn’t interested in getting into the details of his demands because it doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. We would argue that this argument doesn’t care about the real-world information; it is simply the fetishization of power, a blanket demand that Ukraine surrender at every juncture because it is the weaker party. 

A Hill to Die On

For Kuperman, as the Russian forces prepared on the cold night of February 23, 2022, to decapitate the government of its neighbor, including measures like killing its president and eliminating its political elite, it was again Zelensky’s fault, for he “had provoked Russian aggression, although that does not excuse Moscow’s subsequent war crimes.” Quite. 

Here, Kuperman blames Biden for Zelensky's failure to take the steps above. In essence, he blames Biden for at least attempting to abide by the Budapest Accords and not forcing the Ukrainian student to “comply with Putin’s request”. 

Notably, he chides Biden for saying the US would “react swiftly and decisively” to any Russian invasion. In an alternate world, Kuperman believes that Trump, in the same position, would not have given Zelensky such a “blank check”. Another view is that the US acted strategically and forced Russia to act more cautiously when it didn’t signal limits. When it did signal limits, notably by blocking Ukraine from using US weapons to strike inside Russia until late November 2024, American policy conspicuously failed, as this allowed Russia to strike Ukraine with impunity from inside Russia. 

We can only imagine the world in which Trump was in the same position. It is another counterfactual, of course, and impossible to answer. Suppose Zelensky had produced photos of Mykola Zlochevsky and Joe Biden on a yacht on the eve of the 2020 election. In that case, we imagine Trump might have sent a brigade of American troops to Kyiv to deter Russian adventurism. We might also imagine a world in which Trump and Putin divided Ukraine in half, with Ron Lauder getting the lithium deposits. Either outcome appears entirely possible because they are transactional, precisely the approach the current administration trumpets.

And that’s about it. Other people have taken Kuperman to task, including this interesting analysis of the international law claims and problems it raises. Kuperman did not go down the rabbit hole of debating NATO membership as an alleged provocation for Russian actions. We can be grateful for that, as it’s another canard. Still, we are left troubled by this essay, which, among other things, bills scholarship by someone widely questioned, even discredited in the public arena as “overwhelming forensic evidence”. Worse, it privileges Russian strategic interests above Ukraine’s at every turn, even though Russia is a strategic adversary and Ukraine a supposed ally. It also fails to mention the Budapest Memorandum, which should provide a legal and moral basis for our actions. This work is not only a set of opinions that we disagree with, it misinforms its audience on a matter of life and death.

It is difficult to overstate our opprobrium for The Hill for running an article that relies on a conspiracy theory for its central premise. We assume it was not closely fact-checked because it was an opinion piece. But these words matter, and The Hill has a poor track record here that you’d hope it would be eager to correct. Of course, we’re referring to John Solomon’s articles in the same publication smearing then US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, among many other things, which featured prominently in Donald Trump’s 2020 impeachment hearings. The paper was instrumental then in spreading Russian misinformation about Ukraine and, after an overdue and lukewarm investigation of Solomon’s campaign in their publication (amplified on Fox and other outlets, of course), sadly it appears to be doing the same thing now.

Why? We cannot be sure why The Hill has an existential beef with Ukraine, but a major incentive is access to power – the president rewards those who embrace his view of the world and his view, as his Truth Social feed attests, has been poisoned from several different wells, the Russian one chief among them. And there is also something that large swathes of the US political and business elite simply cannot stomach  – the very idea of Ukraine as a prosperous European country embedded in Western security and economic architecture. For them, defying Putin is defying Trump, exceeding their station as a natural resource milch cow and buffer state. A country that has spoiled billions of dollars in natural resource deals by forcing Russia to commit war crimes against it. So we get articles like this, written by an ostensibly neutral academic instead of John Solomon. But the result is the same, and Ukrainians will continue to die because The Hill and other publications spread foundational lies about Ukraine.